Poetry in Translation

Monthly Archives: November 2016

A poem by Hugo Ball in a false translation by Melissa Grey & David Morneau

When we were invited to participate in a concert celebrating the 100th anniversary of Dada, produced by Hans Tammen, we knew quickly that we wanted to incorporate an Oulipian technique in our composition process. Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) was founded in 1960 by the French author Raymond Queneau with a group of authors interested in exploring the potential of literature by applying constraints to the creative process, often rooted in mathematics. We are both attracted to the tight conceptual constraints of their techniques, and are deeply interested in translating their ideas to the process of music composition. This shared interest has fueled many conversations and has indelibly shaped our budding collaboration.

Gadget Berry Dimple uses the Oulipian technique of homophonic (or false) translation. The idea is to translate words from one language to another based on sound rather than meaning. For example:

We began the process by taking Hugo Ball’s Gadji beri bimba (1916) and breaking it out into an alphabetical list of every word within. Then we created false translations for each word in the list, so that affalo became “a fellow”, brussala became “bruised salad”, katalominai became “cat and lonely mice”, and so on. Once finished, we reassembled Ball’s poem using our translations. The result (which is published here) was immediately captivating. We are planning to explore it further, using it as the basis for more music by applying additional Oulipian transformations to it.

For our performance on the 100th anniversary of Dada concert, we created a live sonic texture using a Benjolin synthesizer, a vintage Merlin toy, and a drum machine. Over that we read through our list of translated words as a glossary of false translation: Melissa recited the Ball’s original words and David recited our translations. A video of this performance can be seen here: http://artisteordinaire.org/gadget-berry-dimple-a-glossary-of-false-translation/

Two poems by Raoul Ponchon translated by Mark Lager

“Then [Ponchon] went alone, along the waterfront, pondering…he stopped at booksellers’ boxes…then the Boulevard Saint-Michel…where he fashioned his absinthe…he returned home to the Hotel des Grands Hommes, near the Sorbonne. He pulled out of an old trunk a green coat of an old-fashioned cut, too big for him, and whose embroideries were tarnished…donned an old gardener’s hat…all night he drank, reading the manuscripts of his unpublished works, which so few people know. They contain masterpieces…”